In today's quantitative sample analysis often separation and detection processes are involved wherein for that purpose a variety appropriate devices or combinations of devices are commonly used. For example, within quantitative sample analysis applying high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) devices for separation and detection such as pumps, autosamplers, injectors, columns, valves and detectors are commonly used. Often, such devices are controllable via a control software being executed on a computer as control system. Usually, a plurality of such devices is combined to an analytical instrument allowing to perform the separation and detection processes of the quantitative sample analysis. Some combinations of these devices or analytical instruments can also be controlled by one single control software being executed on a computer. Such controlling of a whole analytical instrument by a single control system can provide a convenient and efficient handling of the analytical instrument.
However, often such analytical instruments are not perfectly suitable to the needs of a specific sample analysis or to a flexible arrangement of sample analyses for example in a laboratory. In such laboratories, for example taking care of high throughput analytics of a company of the pharmaceutical industry, huge numbers of compounds and samples can be quantified per year such as, e.g., about 5′000 compounds in about 250′000 samples. Thereby, the compounds can, e.g., be small molecules having a molar weight between about 100 g per Mol to about 700 g per Mol.
Within this frame efficient analytical instruments and tools to support the analytical method development, the routine analytics, instrument management, reporting and many other tasks can be of crucial importance. Therefore, a rearrangement of the devices of an analytical instrument or a free combination of devices from different suppliers for assembling a suitable instrument is often desired. In that case, the provided convenient control of the analytical instrument via one single control system or part of the functionalities of the single control system is usually at least partially lost. Furthermore, such single control systems often do not fully support all functionalities and operations of an analytical instrument or of certain devices thereof. For example, laboratory activities like method development, preventive maintenance, sample preparation and the like are often not supported by such single control systems. Thus, a comparably inefficient operation of the analytical instrument can result, e.g., particularly including a comparably low utilization rate of at least some of the devices. Additionally, such single control systems are usually not standardized and can therefore not be fully customizable and integratable in, e.g., a commercially available or other laboratory information management system (LIMS) which are mainly focusing on sample workflow, result workflow and data evaluation tools and not covering other laboratory activities.
Therefore, there is a need for a preferably automatic control of a plurality of devices of a separation and detection process allowing an efficient quantitative sample analysis particularly suitable for comparably large numbers of analysis per time unit.